Zora is trying to convince me that “my neck (throat) feels all better” so I will take her out of the house.

I have all these plans of cleaning, exercising, and generally getting back in gear and illness is derailing the plans. I am trying to refuse to be on the sick list, but my droopy eyelids and total lack of energy is fighting me. After spending yesterday afternoon in the ER, pray we didn’t pick up anything new, and that nobody else gets sick. I am not sure that it is working though.

Two sick kids today. The one with the 103 fever is acting like she doesn’t feel so bad, the one with no discernible fever is coughing and grumpy. Doesn’t appear to be anything serious, just “normal” sick.

Our external hard drive, where we store ALL of our pictures (and the scrapbook pages I have spent hours on) and all of our videos, including heirloom pictures that we scanned in and no longer have access too, FAILED. It is a mechanical issue. (most likely a spindle motor failure…sad thing is, the very first Google result when you type in the problem is our exact drive.) The data is most likely still there, but it costs between $1200 – $2500 to recover it and nobody does it locally. The cheapest we have found so far is a place where we would pay to send the drive to them for them to diagnose how much it will be and charge us $65 just to tell us what the total bill would be.

Zach has been looking for a way to fix it, but so far, it looks like it requires a clean room/anti-static room to work on it, so it probably isn’t something we can do ourselves, especially since the data is so precious to us.

I have been sick for days. My fever returned about an hour ago, which means that my once a month, MUCH needed mom’s night out (autism support group meeting) is out. I haven’t been able to go to the gym for over 2 weeks now due to illness. We have no insurance (for the adults) since dh lost his job. We have very little money.

I am so sad. There are are around 15,000 pictures on there, not including the scanned photos, videos, and scrapbook pages.

I was down for the count for a good week. Fever, chills, massive sinus and chest cold, but thankfully no gastro issues. Doing the low carb thing meant that my usual sickness stand by, chicken noodle soup, was out, so I was in search of something with a similar feel that would be healing.

I ended up taking some chicken/bone broth, a bunch of frozen chopped spinach, several cloves of garlic, then streaming in some eggs at the last minute for some awesome egg drop soup. This, along with lots of hot tea, an avocodo and some oranges became my menu for the week. It was a good choice.

I feel much better now. I do have a lingering cough, but from my understanding it may hang around for a good month or two if it follows the trend of everybody else who got knocked over with this bug. Last night was my first night back in bed with the rest of the crew and I didn’t have any coughing fits, so I think I am on the mend.

So far, Zach hasn’t gotten sick at all. Zane was sick the day before I was, never had a fever, and was better in two days. Zora started coughing earlier this week, but hasn’t progressed to a fever, so she might luck out too. I am SO glad that it hit me harder than the kids.

I can’t believe I am even posting a picture today because I look as rotten as I have looked in a long time. I have an excuse though. My mom came up today (thank you mom) so I could have a driver, so that I could Valium. I started my day at 7:30 this morning with scaling and planing 3/4 of my mouth, with Valium on board and many shots (I am really hard to numb and have always had really sensitive teeth).

After that, I took a break to go to the dermatologist. There I found out that my feet thing is mostly likely Schamberg’s disease, which basically just means I have hyperpigmentation on my feet, like my dad and his mom. Lucky me. (it doesn’t hurt or itch, it is just embarrassing) I also found out my mole/brown spots are not cancerous, but I will probably keep getting more as I age (yay me) and had the giant witch’s mole in the middle of my nose taken off, along with a skin tag that grew a skin tag near my eye. Both required MORE shots to do, and I gotta tell you, a few shots in your nose would have been the suckiest thing I have experienced, had it not been for the rest of the day. She took as many skin tags off of my eyelids as I could handle…those are without any anesthesia because it would have cause my eyes to swell shut and bruise horribly. I got the major ones that cause me issues.

Then a few minutes to try and spoon a little soup into my mouth. I only had the lower left corner with any feeling, so it was a messy proposition. Even mom couldn’t keep from giggling when I had to use my fingers to help my lips make a seal around the straw to take some more Valium.

Then back to the dentist for the true marathon. I was in the chair for three hours, getting fillings. I have a serious problem with both scraping sounds and the sound of the drill, which is a big part of why I needed Valium, but I also combatted it by cranking up my Mp3 player loud enough to compete with the drill. (the assistant told me she liked my music afterward. lol)

As I have said before, it is really hard to get me numb enough, and I stopped counting the shots somewhere around 15…there had to be at least 2 dozen by the end of the day, counting everything. I was SO THANKFUL to be taken seriously. I have had dentist not believe that I could feel anything and keep going, which is why I developed such a dental phobia. He was awesome. His staff was awesome. They did such a good job on matching the color that if I didn’t know where every cavity was (due to photoshopping my teeth in pictures that I like, but are ruined by my ugly teeth), I would never be able to see it wasn’t my natural tooth. I literally cried when I saw my teeth in the mirror at the end. (granted, I had to use my fingers to get my lips out of the way. lol).

Then I finished my marathon by having that last quarter of my mouth numbed to do the planing and scaling on them. I used up the last of the Flexible Spending Plan, and maxed out my dental insurance, but I am so thankful that I could get it done and that the office worked with me to get it accomplished in one swoop, and before the end of January when both the insurance and the Flex Spending runs out for us.

I also got some heavy duty pain meds, and they are kicking in now. I still have one numb spot, probably the nerve to my front upper tooth, and now that the shots have mostly worn off, I can tell something got hit in my nose and it hurts and is causing my nose to run almost uncontrollably. It is still worth it though.

So, here is the horrible picture of me, right after I got home and Zora asked what was wrong with my face. I am trying to smile, but I am numb from my lower eyelids to my throat and, in person, look like one of those people who are addicted to plastic surgery with duck lips and too high, too big of cheek implants. I iced my face for a few minutes, then I went to bed and slept for about 5 hours after this photo.

Although I didn’t hit the goal I was wanting to (to be under 200lbs), I did hit a milestone today at a 50lb loss, but more importantly, I got a phone call from my Dr. My A1C levels came back at a 5.2! (“normal” is 6ish, and higher being pre-diabetes, then higher yet is diabetes.). That means I am doing a lot better at controlling it (I am not on insulin, and don’t have problems with hypoglycemia at this point, which can lower the number in a “bad” way). My blood pressure is good (not fabulous, but good), and although my cholesterol is within normal range, my HDL (the good one) is too low of a percentage, so I need to address that now too. However, it is likely that if I keep exercising and sticking to the new eating habits, it should shift into a more healthy balance. My cholesterol level isn’t severe enough to be medicated, just monitored at this point. (however, at this point I am staying on the metformin, which helps with the PCOS)

So, today I got the gift of empowerment. Feeling like my efforts are finally starting to pay off. It feels damn good.

The very end of August both kids got sick with fevers the weekend before school started. A few days into school it looked like Zora had a bunch of bug bites on her elbow, and after seeing some of the parent’s reaction, I decided to take her to the doctor just to make sure it wasn’t chicken pox. Well, the doctor thought it was chicken pox, so Zora’s second day of school and the whole next week was cancelled. It never got any worse than the day I took her to the doctor (it was itching her like crazy that day) and, honestly, didn’t really look like chicken pox to me. Zane had one spot on his back that looked similar. By the time we got the word from the doctor, both kids were feeling better so staying at home was pretty much torture because neither of the kids felt bad. Zane is happy staying home, but Zora was ready to lose it after a day of not leaving the house.

We will still get the titers checked when they hit puberty to make sure they have an immunity to chicken pox before they start hitting the period where it can be more serious (in a kid, it isn’t usually bad, but it is pretty awful as an adult) to know whether they will need a vax for it. I hope it was CP since it was such a PITA for us, but I am not convinced it was.

Zach refuses to take meds for anxiety, which sort of drive me crazy (ironic, isn’t it), but I understand and support him. After much discussion, we have decided we are going to make a concerted effort to exercise more, including Yoga & Tai Chi type things, and start practicing meditation.

By “coincidence” (I don’t believe in coincidence) there was a show on one of the science channels about a mummy found, that talked at length about Buddhist monks and their mediation practices (the mummy was a monk), and showed the scientific evaluation of how meditation helped control breathing, heart rate, etc. and how dramatically it could help. That sparked a search for a local place to meditate at, which lead me to the discovery of several places in town. However, all of them were strongly Buddhist (and I think one was Hindu) and we aren’t comfortable with that. We both appreciate Buddhist thought, but it is because there are a lot of parallels to Christianity that we find inspiring, but we aren’t Buddhist. We are Christian.

I have always thought of meditation as a form of prayer, and I don’t feel comfortable praying to anybody except God. There are a lot of calls to meditate in the bible (“Be still and know that I am God” is one that comes to mind first, and Jesus’ going off to a quiet place to pray at length is another). After some more searching, I found two websites that offered Christian meditation information/education. Christian Meditation and World Community for Christian Meditation. The latter appealed to me more, but the first one seemed a little more like “Christian Meditation for the Clueless”, which we are right now. I know you don’t need anything to meditate, but I thought the more guided meditation would be a good set of training wheels while we learn how to do this, how to quiet our thoughts better. I can do it in short bursts, but not for an extended period of time, at least not without my thought going all over the place. The closest I get is when I zone out during knitting. So, we got some of the mp3 downloads from the first site and are trying that. (some of the downloads are bordering on offensive to me, but most of them look good. I guess I will find out. lol)

I also found this cool Yoga-type video that I want. It is called “Yoga Prayer” and the following line in the description caught my attention: Ryan seamlessly harmonizes prayers like Psalm 84, the Peace Prayer of Saint Francis, and the Beatitudes with vitalizing yoga postures to create a uniquely powerful spiritual practice. (IMO, the Beatitudes are among the most important passage of the bible, and the Prayer of St Francis is one of my favorite writings ever). I had just gotten “Yoga for Inflexible People”, so I will do that for a while until I get a little more physically able to do the stretches (I can’t even touch my toes right now, so a lot of the stuff is just so far beyond me at this point there really isn’t any point until I get into better shape), but this is on my “list of things to get” when I am ready for it. I saw some other aerobics tapes “for Christians”, but many of them look too dorky for words, and this is coming from somebody who actually bought a Richard Simmons tape along with the Yoga..inflexible tape. lol.

Zane developed a lacy rash today, along with the red cheeks & ears, and the gastric symptoms. We sort of freaked out at first, but it looks like it is just something annoying most of the time. Zora has sort of pinkish cheeks now too and has had some of the gastric symptoms too…I now suspect she might get a little worse before getting better too. Yuck.

Zane's age

Zane is 16 years, 4 months, and 28 days old

Zora's age

Zora is 12 years, 5 months, and 1 day old

Random Quote

Call them rules or call them limits, good ones, I believe, have this in common: They serve reasonable purposes; they are practical and within a child’s capability; they are consistent; and they are an expression of loving concern.— Fred Rogers